With the increasing use of electronic devices utilizing integrated circuits to provide different types of information for a variety of different applications, there has been an increasing need to adequately protect sensitive and/or critical information that may be stored within an electronic device to limit access to such information to only such other devices that have permission to access the information. Some examples of applications include the authentication of devices, protection of confidential information within a device, and securing a communication between two or more devices.
A physically unclonable function (PUF) is a physical structure generally within an integrated circuit that provides a number of corresponding outputs (e.g., responses) in response to inputs (e.g., challenges/requests) to the PUF. Each PUF provides one or more sets of request-response pairs. An identity of the integrated circuit may be established by such request-response pairs provided by the PUF. With the establishment of the identity, secure communication can be provided between devices. The PUF can also be used for existing authentication purposes to replace the current method of assigning an identity to an electronic device. Since the PUF is based on intrinsic properties of a manufacturing process, the PUF has various advantages over conventional authentication approaches that inscribe an identity on a device that may be mimicked and/or reverse engineered more easily.